In Search of Iago

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Joan Didion’sPlay it as it Lays famously opens with the question, “What makes Iago evil? Some people ask. I never ask.”

I’m one of the people who asks. Samuel Coleridge might have called the search for Iago “the motive hunting of motiveless malignity,” but I lack the capacity to accept that certain truths are just inscrutable. I reason that because fictional characters are born in the mind of the author, their actions must necessarily stem from something resembling Kantian categorical imperatives. Within the confines of their own logic, their actions make perfect sense. There is internal consistency and cause and effect. The system is governed by rules; the game is to discern exactly what those rules are.

It’s a cliché that nothing is more interesting to people than other people, but in essence, those of us who ask about Iago do so because he is not so different a puzzle from human beings. He is only a more tantalizing one, because his author has deliberately controlled what we see and know of him, as though dispensing clues. But the prize for solving a literary conundrum is the same as for solving a human one: if I can figure out Iago, I can figure out Hamlet, I can figure out anyone and I can figure out you.

1. As An Aside
Having searched for Iago predominantly throughout other works of fiction, I think it is worth pointing out that I’m aware of the tenuous merit of this project. It’s considered fairly dubious practice to explain the motivations of real people via fictional characters. But what about explaining the motivations of fictional characters via other fictional characters? Let alone fictional characters created long after the fictional characters in question? Won’t that turn into something of an analytical Ponzi scheme?

It may also be worth noting that real world psychology, if not always an exact science, is farther along than any such fictional goose chase. Iago might simply be found in the entry under “Antisocial Personality Disorder” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV for demonstrating “a pervasive pattern of disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others that begins in childhood or early adolescence and continues into adulthood.” Real world sociopaths have been described in detail in nonfiction, from Charles Manson in Helter Skelter to Dick Hickock in In Cold Blood. Dick Hickock has “one of those smiles that really work,” an IQ of 130 and the sort of toughness that “existed solely in situations where he unarguably had the upper hand.” Dick even looks exactly how Iago should look: “his own face enthralled him. Each angle of it induced a different impression. It was a changeling’s face, and mirror-guided experiments had taught him how to ring the changes, how to look now ominous, now impish, now soulful …”

But I’m not interested in diagnosing Iago, per se. I’m not trying to discern what he looks like, or what his childhood practices might have been. I am searching for the emotional truth of his nature, which (as Tim O’Brien famously opined) may be better found in another fictional story than in facts.

2. Excerpts From A Guide To Literary Sociopaths
The sort of villains in popular fiction that enjoy the same level of celebrity as Iago include the likes of Thomas Harris’ Hannibal Lector, Cormac McCarthy’s Anton Chigurh and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor Moriarty. The common thread through many a literary sociopath is, as you may have noticed, that they have extremely evil-sounding names. Sociopaths in fiction are often intended to either appeal to readers’ fantasies that good and bad could be so easy to identify in real life, or are so absurdly riddled with diabolical clichés that they are parodies of themselves (like the pantheon of villains in Pynchon’s and Heller’s comic masterpieces, or Jasper Fforde’s Acheron Hades, who explains in his memoir, “Degeneracy for Pleasure and Profit,” that the “best reason for committing loathsome and detestable acts – and let’s face it, I am considered something of an expert in the field – is purely for their own sake.”)

But there is something far more understated, and sinister, about Iago as a villain. Like Zoe Heller’s Barbara Covett from Notes on a Scandal, Daphne Du Maurier’s Mrs. Danvers, or perhaps even Brontë’s Heathcliff, the real evil that Iago inflicts is upon the people to whom he is closest. He is the godfather of villains who rot from the inside out.

Destroying those to whom one is closest reeks of a certain sort of motivelessness. Kevin Frazier, in his excellent essay on A.C. Bradleyhere at The Millions, points to the following discussion of Iago from Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy:

To ‘plume up the will’, to heighten the sense of power or superiority—this seems to be the unconscious motive of many acts of cruelty which evidently do not spring chiefly from ill-will, and which therefore puzzle and sometimes horrify us most. It is often this that makes a man bully the wife or children of whom he is fond. The boy who torments another boy, as we say, ‘for no reason’, or who without any hatred for frogs tortures a frog … So it is with Iago. His thwarted sense of superiority wants satisfaction.

What strikes me most about this passage is that the examples chosen for being akin to Iago’s cruelty suggest that Iagoesque cruelty is almost commonplace. Horrifying though it is, there is nothing particularly rare or exotic about a man bullying a wife or child, or about thwarted superiority craving satisfaction. The implication is that it might not be such a mystery why Iago’s victims line up so willingly to be abused. Likewise, there might be nothing so superhuman about Iago’s power to abuse them. From Katherine Dunn’s sublime novel Geek Love, the following description of Arturo Binewski, the book’s megalomaniacal villain, struck me as pure, undifferentiated Iago: “He seems to have no sympathy for anyone, but total empathy.”

Empathy is a curious source of power. Relatively speaking, it is unglamorous in the extreme – it is of the sort best suited to Dostoevsky’s contention in Crime and Punishment that “Power is only given to those who dare to lower themselves and pick it up.” Far more than any sheer irresistibility, the ingratiating, servile role Iago must steadfastly play for both Desdemona and Othello is the key to his seductiveness. Othello the Venetian general might be a natural leader, but Iago cannot be puppet master without being puppet himself. He succeeds as long as he does solely because the near-sightedness of his victims prevent them from asking – not “why would he lie?” but – “why doesn’t he have any life of his own?”

3. How I Picture Iago When He Is Off-Stage
In Geek Love, while attempting to gain total control over his family, Arturo Binewski starts bugging the room of his sisters Iphy and Elly. Reports his documentarian Norval:

I find this depressing. The idea of Arty sitting and listening to hour after hour of footsteps, pages turning, toilet flushing, comb running through hair. Elly’s conversation has been reduced to the syllable mmmmmm and Iphy is not in the mood for song. Her piano is covered with dust … and Arty is listening to her file her nails.

4. A Comic DetourThat villainy can be pathetic is a well-explored contradiction in fiction. Brett Easton Ellis’ oddly beloved misanthrope and American Psycho Patrick Bateman and his ilk suffer from the incurable disadvantage of being impossible to take seriously. Their particular breed of literary sociopath consists, perhaps naturally, of comic characters, because there is something so pathetic about hating absolutely everyone. Grandiose ambitions aside, these characters are as paralyzed by issues as Phillip Roth’s Portnoy, and just about as menacing. In Sartre’s darkly funny “Erostratus,” the narrator sends out over a hundred letters announcing the following:

I suppose you might be curious to know what a man can be like who does not love men. Very well, I am such a man, and I love them so little that soon I am going out and killing half a dozen of them; perhaps you might wonder why only half a dozen? Because my revolver only has six cartridges. A monstrosity, isn’t it? And moreover, an act strictly impolitic?

Now, there is a relationship between the extent to which someone declares themselves to be a particular thing, and the extent to which he or she actually is that thing – and that relationship is plainly inverse. The comic sociopaths are so desperate to be taken seriously that they can never be taken seriously, and so fumbling and impotent in their attempts that you know they will only get themselves into trouble.

Returning now to Othello and the genre of tragedy, if you subtract the comedic element from being pathetic, who are you left with?

5. The Regular Joe
I suppose I always knew I’d arrive here at the end.

Dunn gets here first, of course. In one of Geek Love’s final notes on Arturo, his documentarian writes:

General opinion about Arty varies, from those who see him as a profound humanitarian to those who view him as a ruthless reptile. I myself have held most of the opinions in this spectrum at one time or another … however, I come to see him as just a regular Joe – jealous, bitter, possessive, competitive, in a constant frenzy to disguise his lack of self-esteem, drowning in deadly love, and utterly unable to prevent himself from gorging on the coals of hell in his search for revenge.

What Dunn so evocatively indicates is that the trick to the complexity of characters such as Arturo is that there is no complexity. The documentarian’s final notes on him ring of disgust upon making this discovery – self-disgust, and perhaps even a little disgust for his subject.

Likewise, we build a labyrinth of motive and mythology around Iago because for all of his manipulation and the epic destruction it causes, we believe – or hope – he must be a monster. We are wont to compare him to the vilest of both real world and fictional sociopaths. We resist stripping away at him, knowing we will be sorely disappointed by what we find underneath.

Ujala Sehgal
is an associate editor for The Millions. She works for the New York Civil Liberties Union, the NY Chapter of the ACLU. She was formerly a writer for The Atlantic's news website The Wire, and a co-editor of NY media blog FishbowlNY. Her writing has appeared in The Millions, TheAtlantic.com, Newsday, National Journal, The Rumpus, and elsewhere, and is partly collected at her website, TheCivilWriter.com. Follow @ujalasehgal.

[Note: The student I describe is a composite character of many students I’ve met in my 20 years of teaching.]
A few months ago, Tracy came to my office. She was majoring in something practical, “but I love reading, and I love writing,” she said.
She wanted me to talk her into becoming a creative writing major. But she needed assurances.
Her eyes got a little dreamy. “I know that somewhere out there, there’s a building where I can work and get paid to do what I love. Tell me. What is that building?” she asked. “How do I find it?”
My heart broke a little then, because once upon a time, I dreamed about that building, too. “Well, there isn’t just one building,” I said. “There are thousands of buildings.”
“You mean publishing houses,” she said, nodding her head.
I hear this a lot from students: I want to work in publishing. Usually it means that they love the world of books more than they actually want to be writers—and there’s certainly nothing wrong with that.
So I told her about a class we offered on Literary Editing and Publishing. I told her about the internship program in New York to which she could apply. “But Tracy, I want you to know that it’s hard to get a job in publishing. At least in the way that you imagine it.”
“It is?” She looked incredulous.
“Yeah, there’s this thing you might have heard of. It’s called ‘the internet.’ Traditional publishing—books, magazines, newspapers—it’s all shrinking.”
“Oh.”
“But independent and small press publishing is growing.” I told her all about it.
“Oh!”
“But you need to know this. Many people who do it have a day job and work on their publishing ventures on the side.”
“But what about…” She named a best-selling book by a self-published author.
“Yes,” I said. “There are some success stories, but that’s not what happens most of the time. The problem is that there are more people who desperately want to be writers than there’s a readership to completely absorb them.”
I shared stuff like the 10 Awful Truths about Book Publishing.
“Oh,” she said. “I figured with all things that are published, I could find a job as an editor.”
“Well, you probably wouldn’t search in terms of editor.” I hate saying this, but it’s the truth. “Search for words like communications and content.”
I did a quick Google search and found a full-time job in Connecticut for an English major to serve as a “communications specialist.”
Her face lit up. “What kind of company is it?”
I scanned the website. “They make welding electrodes and filler wires.”
“Oh.” Her face fell.
“It’s a full-time job where you would think critically, communicate clearly, solve problems, and apply your writing skills.”
No response.
“You’d get to travel to trade shows.”
“I’m sorry, but I can’t see myself doing something like that,” she said.
“Why not?”
“I’d feel like I wasn’t really using my degree.”
“But it says right here they’re looking for an English major.”
“I love books!” she said, “not welding.”
“I know, I know,” I said, “but with a good job and good insurance, you’d have a stable life and money for books and maybe time to write, too.”
She looked around my office, at the books lining my shelves, the pile of stories waiting to be read, the three 20-page proposals that needed to be read by 3 o’clock for the College Curriculum Committee. “I’d really love to do what you do,” she said. “Teach English.”
“You want to major in English Education? Teach high school?”
“No, I want to teach college. How do I do that?”
I sighed. “Become a writer.”
Her eyes lit up again. “Yes, that’s what I want!”
“You’d go to graduate school.”
“Yes!”
“Publish.”
Tracy’s eyes practically rolled back in her head. “Yes!”
And even though she was still a [pre-professional major], not an English major, I pictured the day in the near future when she’d come to me asking for a letter of recommendation. Every time I write one, I ask myself: Am I contributing to the contingent faculty crisis in English?
In the last 20 years, I’ve written approximately 50 letters for students applying to graduate creative writing programs, and only two of them are currently in tenure-line jobs. The rest are pretty evenly split between those in non-tenure line jobs in academia and those working outside academia entirely.
When is the right time to tell people about their job prospects? In graduate school? Before they even apply to graduate school? Or sooner than that even—in their first creative writing class? Never? Let them Google it because it’s just too depressing otherwise?
I hadn’t even read a word of her writing yet, but I knew how Tracy’s story might go. I decided to be honest.
I took a deep breath. “Look, I need to explain something to you, Tracy. Last year, 4000 students earned a graduate degree in creative writing. And do you know how many tenure-track teaching jobs there were to which they could apply?”
“A thousand?” she guessed.
“A hundred.” I showed her the report from AWP to prove it.
“Oh.” She looked at the floor. “But what about Professor Jones? I had him for freshman composition. He’s a writer, and he teaches. He got one of those 100 jobs.”
That’s when I explained the utter unfairness that Professor Jones was one of our amazing full-time contingent faculty members. He’d published multiple books and had applied for hundreds of tenure-track jobs in the five years since he’d graduated with his MFA. “No, he hasn’t gotten one of those 100 jobs. Not yet.”
“But he’s teaching and writing, just like you,” she said.
That’s when I explained the utter unfairness that Professor Jones made half of what I made for doing pretty much the same job. I pointed to my computer screen, to the job at the welding company waiting in Connecticut. “You’d probably make as much there with your BA as he does right now with a graduate degree. Maybe more.”
Tracy pulled at her hair. “But it’s not fair! They told me to go to college and follow my dreams! Where am I supposed to work?”
“Please calm down. This isn’t the only job in the country,” I said. “It’s just the first one that came up on Google.”
But I knew why Tracy was angry. All my students are dealing with a post-employment economy and a trillion dollars of student loan debt. I recognize the looks on their faces. I grew up with a father full of the same righteous anger and disillusionment. He hired out on the railroad when he was 20 years old and fully expected that he'd have a job for life. But then the economy changed. The world changed. How many times did I find him quietly seething in the kitchen, smoking a cigarette, shaking his head in rage and disbelief?
That look broke me.
I was Tracy's age when I went to see my college professors to discuss what I should do with my life. Even though I was a first-generation college student, no one dissuaded me from majoring in creative writing or from applying to graduate programs. There was no reason to.
At that time, there were only 10 undergraduate creative writing programs in the country.
Today there are 592.
When I was in college (1987-1991), there were only about 50 graduate creative writing programs in the country.
Today there are 418.
And honestly, even if my professors had tried to dissuade me, I wouldn't have listened. I wouldn't have wanted to take that job at the welding company either. And because I was born at the right historical moment—before all this started to happen--and because I got my graduate degree just as the number of tenure-track creative writing jobs started to open up, I landed my first job (with no book) and have remained employed ever since.
If I was 26 right now rather than 46, maybe I'd say, Screw it, and do something else for a living.
Or maybe not.
Poor Tracy. Oh Christ, all the Tracys in this country looking for that magic building. Who believed all that marketing jazz from colleges all over this country. Your future starts here! Knowledge to go places! Tracy just wants her degree to mean something, and the key is finding the magic building where all the English majors work.
“Oh God," Tracy says, "how am I supposed to pay back my student loans?”
I asked her how much she owed, and she told me. I swallowed. Hard. Also, I'd like to mention that Tracy had a child/a sick parent/a dying grandparent.
“Tracy, do you want to be a writer?”
She thought about it for a second. “I don’t know.”
I gave her the short version of this advice, which I’ve been giving for years. The job you get after graduation has nothing to do with whether or not you are a writer. And applying to (and being accepted into) a graduate writing program has nothing to do whether or not you are a writer. “If what you love is reading,” I said, “why don’t you major in literature?”
“Because creative writing is more practical.”
I almost choked on my coffee. “Oh my. What kind of classes do you think we offer in the creative writing major?”
Tracy paused. “Well, I figure it’s like the bookstore. There’s a mystery section, a young adult section, biographies, graphic novels. You know. And we learn how to write them.”
I patted her hand. “I’m so sorry. It’s not like that at all.” I explained that the taxonomy of creative writing was about choosing a genre.
“Right,” Tracy said. “That’s what I said. Choosing a genre.”
“Not that kind of genre.” I counted them off on the fingers. “Fiction. Poetry. Creative Nonfiction. Screenwriting. Playwriting.”
“So you’re saying I major in creative writing and get a job as a fiction writer or a screenwriter!” Her eyes got bright again.
“Or maybe something else.” I counted them off. Marketing. Teaching. Tech Writing. Non-profits. Publishing. I ran out of fingers, but I kept going. Library science. Law school. Student Affairs. Business. Publishing. Television. Peace Corps. Politics.
Tracy look frightened.
“We don’t give you the map,” I said. “We show you a sky full of stars to navigate by.” I broke out my horrible faux British accent. “’All I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.’”
“What?”
“It’s a poem. About finding your way without a map.”
“Screw that. I want the map.” She raised her voice to me a little, using a tone I’ve come to call “buyer’s remorse.” Tracy said, “I want you to teach me how to get one of those jobs you just mentioned.”
“We will! We’ll teach you how to write and think and speak and read and analyze and empathize and imagine.”
“But then why don’t you change the major from all those genres to something I can actually beeeee,” she pleaded.
“Like this, you mean.” I pulled up my university website and navigated to the Department of Technology and its degree programs.
I explained that my brother had graduated from this very university from this very department twenty years earlier. He went straight into a good paying engineering job with a company that made automobile parts.
“In this major, they identify the things you can beeeee…” I counted them off on my fingers:
1. A computer technologist
2. A construction-site manager
3. A graphic arts manager
4. A manufacturing engineer
5. A high-school teacher of technology
I held up my other hand. “And they create a curriculum that tracks you right into those careers.”
1. Computer Technology
2. Construction Management
3. Graphic Arts Management
4. Manufacturing Engineering
5. Technology Education
I brought my hands together with a clap.
Tracy shook her hands in the air. “Yessssssssssssss! It makes so much sense! But here’s what you guys in Creative Writing do!” She ticked off the five genres on one hand:
1. Fiction
2. Poetry
3. Creative Nonfiction
4. Screenplay
5. Playwriting
And on her other hand, she ticked off five “random” careers that our students have landed lately:
1. Residence Hall Director
2. Associate Professor of Communication Studies
3. Staff writer for BuzzFeed
4. Career Adviser at a small, liberal arts college
5. MFA student/poet/reading series coordinator
Tracy brought her hands together crosswise. “They don’t match up. Well, except for that one guy who got into grad school for poetry. How are the rest of us supposed to know what to do when we graduate?”
“You turn the wheel,” I said, reaching over and rotating her crossed hands until her fingers aligned.
“How do I do that?” She’d never looked more serious.
“With your mind.” I touched the side of my head. “And transferable skills.”
“You have to teach us how to turn the wheel!” Tracy said. “You can’t just expect that we’ll know how to navigate on a starry night.”
“I’ll give you that,” I said. “We could do better. But that’s also what the Career Center is for. Have you ever gone there?”
She looked like she might punch me.
“Tracy, do you know what happened to my brother?”
“He became CEO of the company.” She crossed her arms sullenly.
“No. He changed companies just as the economy crashed in 2008. He lost his job, and there weren’t any others like it in the region. He needed to think of something else to be, but for a long time, he couldn’t. And do you know why?”
Finally, she got it. “Because he didn’t major in creative writing.”
I smiled. “Sort of.”
“Because of this.” She brought her hands together. “Because they only gave him one star to steer by.”
I wanted to hug her then. “You don’t go to college to train for your first job, but for a lifetime of jobs,” I said. “That’s the real world.”
I told her to sign up for our Intro to Creative Writing class. “If you love it, then consider changing your major. Or stick with [her pre-professional major] and get a creative writing minor.”
Tracy thanked me and walked out the door. I’ve never seen her again, but I hope she found what she was looking for.
I really, really mean that.
Image: Kevin Dooley/flickr

There's an abundance of literature that tells teenage girls, as well as some of us older ones too, "how to." Within, she discovers what makes guys tick, how to tame unruly skin, and lessons on looking good. Image, image everywhere, and this no doubt is practiced and perfected within her Facebook profile, and among her expanding, seeming limitless network of friends. Today's young sophisticate learns quickly that appearances matter. But her mind still receives the short shrift. It's not cool to stand her ground in battles of the intellect, and it's brainy, not to mention isolating, to read too many books. And let's say she already eschews such magazines and dating guides as callow or shallow, to where does our intellectual debutante turn for advice?Lucky for her, the first installment of Susan Sontag's journals, composed during her teens and twenties, were recently collected and published in Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-63. Sontag, one of the leading public intellectuals of the last fifty years, left a paper trail of her formative years that is as personal as it is articulate, learned, and hungry for experience. Deborah Eisenberg swoons over Sontag's lucid insight in her New York Review of Books review: "It must always be fascinating to observe a child going about unwrapping the package that is herself... And how much more fascinating it is when the child is able to chronicle the process and the contents themselves are fascinating!" And later: "There's no time for jokes or for alienated slacker bemusement. Everything must be read, everything!" Judging from the frequency of exclamation marks, Eisenberg, too, appears moved by the personal revelations and the urgency of Sontag's entries. (Take note, dear girls, Deborah Eisenberg is a writer to add to your reading list - we'll get to the list-making soon.)With Sontag as the lodestar, the young, aspiring intellectual won't be led astray. No, not every girl will be endowed with such a capacity for insight and analysis, nor will she necessarily share Sontag's unremitting energy, seriousness, or articulate thought. But she may feel reassured that by following Sontag's steps she's on the right path and that, in her awareness of beauty and image, she already has conquered one step, as Sontag reflects: "physical beauty is enormously, almost morbidly, important to me."To follow closely in Sontag's footsteps, the young intellect must first exhibit precocity. She should read and read more (it would help to have read Gide, Mann, and Rilke by age 15), and compile lengthy reading lists that include Dante, Pushkin, Rimbaud, Synge, and O'Neill. She should compulsively make other lists, too, of words, music, and slang - of anything that interests her, really - and establish a set of beliefs.And then: go off to college at 16 - if not at first to a prestigious academic institution, then transfer to one on scholarship. Become a research assistant to a dazzling young professor, and within ten days, get engaged, then marry him (if you marry at all). Have one child while you're still very young, but make sure to have a nanny, too. Live in Paris, live in New York, or in a major cultural center at least. Travel to Europe frequently. Go to the theater, go to the opera, go to see films, sometimes two or three times a day. Cultivate an insatiable appetite, for culture, for aesthetics, for luxury, for life, and also for women. But even in living, remember to remain disinvolved and sometimes keep to yourself. Again, read as if your life depended on it, as if you're addicted, and, eventually, write. Be serious, be confident, be brave, and, above all, be true to yourself.What's more important than reliving Sontag's life is remaining faithful to the essence of her message. As Sontag discovers in her semesters at Berkeley - "God, living is enormous!" Remember, its expanses are wide, and it is often the scope of imagination that circumscribes. You should move these journals to the top of your reading queue. But until you have the chance to do so, I've distilled Sontag's observations and reflections to seven guiding tenets:1. Read voraciously: "Some years ago I realized that reading made me sick, that I was like an alcoholic who nevertheless experiences a hangover after each binge... And I couldn't keep away from the stuff."2. Live voraciously (not vicariously), too: "A thought occurred to me today - so obvious, so always obvious! It was absurd to suddenly comprehend it for the first time - I felt rather giddy, a little hysterical: - There is nothing, nothing that stops me from doing anything except myself..." And also: "The really important thing is not to reject anything...," and, "I want to err on the side of violence and excess, rather than to underfill my moments."3. Be confident, ambitious, and cultivate your ego: "Good writers are roaring egotists, even to the point of fatuity." And: "With a little ego-building - such as the fait accompli this journal provides - I shall win through to the confidence that I (I) have something to say, that should be said."4. Keep a journal of your own: "In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could do to any person; I create myself. The journal is a vehicle for my sense of selfhood. It represents me as emotionally and spiritually independent. Therefore (alas) it does not simply record my actual, daily life but rather - in many cases - offers an alternative to it." But keep in mind: "One of the main (social) functions of a journal is precisely to be read furtively by other people, the people (like parents + lovers) about whom one has been cruelly honest in the journal."5. All the world's a stage: "Through the mask of my behavior, I do not protect my raw, genuine self - I overcome it." "...I live my life as a spectacle for myself, for my own edification." And, quoting Stendhal: "Create an effect, then leave quickly."6. Make time for good sex: "The orgasm focuses. I lust to write. The coming of the orgasm is not salvation, but, more, the birth of ego. Yet the only kind of writer [I] could be is the kind who exposes himself... To write is to spend oneself, to gamble oneself. But up to now I have not even liked the sound of my own name. To write, I must love my name. The writer is in love with himself..." (c.f. #3)7. Betray others but always be true to yourself: "I have always betrayed people to each other. No wonder I've been so high-minded and scrupulous about how I use the word 'friend'!" and "It's better to hurt people than not be whole." Most of all: "Love the truth above wanting to be good."

5 comments:

“Likewise, we build a labyrinth of motive and mythology around Iago because for all of his manipulation and the epic destruction it causes, we believe – or hope – he must be a monster. We are wont to compare him to the vilest of both real world and fictional sociopaths. We resist stripping away at him, knowing we will be sorely disappointed by what we find underneath.”

– While I appreciate the impetus and inventory of this article, I disagree with the pat self-assurance of its conclusion. Iago contains multitudes and, like all of Shakespeare’s greatest characters, is more capable of shaking us down than we are of him. His magnificence is likewise more a matter of scale, depth, magnitude than ‘complexities’ or psychological categories. The best readings of Iago, Harold Bloom’s among them, don’t make an attempt to attribute motive to his nihilistic vitalism. Chris Nolan and Heath Ledger’s combined efforts produced the same sublime effect in the creation of the re-booted Joker, a character as close to the Iago bone as any (Anton C. included) I’ve come across since first reading the play in college. Iagoism, if it were to be simplified into a dictum, might be ‘to will the agency of chaos.’ One thinks of Ledger suspended upside down, giggling to himself as he tells Batman that all Gotham’s paragon of goodness (Harvey Dent) needed to seek the abyss was a little push. The scene left me with the same rootless and ineffable angst as my first time hearing ‘Honest’ Iago’s final words – ‘Demand me nothing. What you know, you know. From this time forth I never will speak word.’

Agree with Felix, if you want an evil character, and you want one from McCarthy, it’s the JUDGE no question. Easily the most sinister, upsetting, powerful fucker of any book you’ve mentioned in the whole essay!

1.Kobo Abe's misshapen world accommodates the corny tropes of thriller, adventure and detective fiction. It accommodates lengthy philosophical ruminations on identity, self-image and the loss or fragmentation thereof. It accommodates an impotent hospital director who grafts the severed lower half of a well-endowed underling to his own back in order to transform himself into a sexually superpowered centaur and thus better pleasure a blob-like thirteen-year-old girl bedridden by her slowly dissolving bones.
Already, the mind reels. If Abe's body of work has room for an image like that, where exactly are its boundaries? If you're unfamiliar with the man's books, I'd forgive you for imagining the heaving epics of an undisciplined maximalist, novels where ridiculousness piles upon grotesquerie until both text and reader collapse. What's more, Abe would seem to replace the relative asexuality of those books with grim, elaborate perversion. But Abe's are relatively slim, aesthetically spare volumes, untainted by baroque language and puerile impulses toward fantasy. His novels, at least the eight currently available in English translation, mix a pinch of weirdness into a grayish medium of the mundane, the concrete and the scientific. But Abe's flavor of weirdness, which nobody has yet replicated, is pungent indeed.
2. The Nature of This Weirdness
Recalling the time he read Abe's The Box Man, young lit figure Tao Linwrites: "I think after 80 pages the book becomes some kind of 'meta' thing that focuses on 'sexual fetishes'/'narrative reliability issues.'" Of a set of Abe novels that includes Secret Rendezvous, the province of that boneless girl-loving horse-man, David Auerbachwrites: "They don't seem like successes, and it's not easy to say that they succeed on their own terms, because they don't appear to have their own terms. Calling them pretentious is besides the point, since the books don't have a pretense towards anything in particular. Psychological and and political intimations turn out to be complete blinds; what mostly flows out of the books is deep, total sickness."
I'm no academic, but my approximation of an academic definition of the Abean sensibility would be "the realistic, rational observation of banal settings and banal personalities gradually drained of logic and thus dissolved into absurd decadence." The Typical Abe Protagonist (TAP), perhaps a shoe salesman or a schoolteacher, gets swept up, by little fault of his own, into potentially alarming circumstances. Maybe he's importuned to find an unusual missing person; maybe he misses the last bus home; maybe leaves begin growing from his flesh. Unflustered, and indeed unflusterable, he calmly formulates hypotheses meant to solve his problem.
As the TAP methodically tests, rejects and reforumulates these hypotheses, the problem worsens, grows less comprehensible and forks off into a bouquet of new obstacles. By the end, he's made peace with his situation, become too psychologically fragmented and untethered to respond, found himself in a world that's lost its own bearings or experienced some combination thereof. This crude boiling-down admits exceptions — some specific Abe protagonists get themselves into trouble, for instance, or fail to take the obvious action to circumvent the whole mess — but its broad strokes align with the actual work.
I can't overstate the Scientific Method rigidity of the TAP's thought process. Whether laconic hired investigator, obese survivalist or the cardboard-clad bum, Abe's narrators all possess a quasi-Aspergian attention to detail and unshakable faith in causality. Yet the mechanisms of causation in Abe's world don't merit the kind of trust we've given those in ours, though the TAP offers it, generously. "Even in the world of the absurd," David Kefferwrites in his study of Abe, "the scientist persists. He attempts to make sense of his surroundings using logic and scientific reasoning. Of course, it is hopeless to think that the irrational can be described in terms of the rational, but this thought never dawns on the protagonist."
3. The Extent to Which Kobo Abe's Tone is "Wooden"
Keffer points out a "heaviness intrinsic to Abe's work" which "takes the form of detailed and laborious description of the psychological mechanisms by which a brain, properly trained, perceives and reacts to the world." As Proust steps us through all the subjective details of recalling the memories evoked by that cookie, the TAP steps us through the subjective details of every major decision and observation he makes — and a lot of the minor ones, too. The effect is at once deeply familiar and pretty damned alien.
Part of this could have to do with translation, conceived as all of Abe's novels were in Japanese. As such, they're almost entirely devoid of U.S.-style irony — one of the few Western innovations Japan, blessedly, never got around to replicating — and possess the simultaneous economy of words and slight excess of formality you hit in other translated texts of all well-known 20th-century Japanese novelists except maybe Kenzaburo Oe.
Whether this commonality of voice comes from the mechanics of Japanese-to-English translation, the customs of Japanese fiction or the Japanese language itself I'm not equipped to determine. What I can tell is that, when you express the equanimous, analytical mindset of the TAP through such distanced language, what you get is aesthetically polarizing, writing that either compels you in a way you can't pin down or stokes discomfort somewhere deep in your viscera. Abe's detractors mutter "Something's very wrong here — but what?" Abe's fans mutter "Something's very right here — but what?"
4. Relatively Sane Works"You ever see that movie Woman in the Dunes?" asks Kenny Shopsin, the intense, foul-mouthed New York restaurateur in Matt Mahurin'sI Like Killing Flies, the documentary that profiles him. He compares his own days, spent filling customers' orders that only pile up again, and the "hero" of the film's, spent shoveling sand that only piles up again. Abe's stories tend to provoke a great deal of talk about symbol, allegory, metaphor and suchlike, about which more later. This particular story has reached surprisingly far and wide, more so than anything else in his bibliography.
If someone knows the name Kobo Abe, chances are they know Woman in the Dunes, published in Japanese in 1962 and English in 1964. Much of this surely owes to Hiroshi Teshigahara's 1964 film adaptation, the vehicle by which it made its way to Mr. Shopsin. Identification must also play a role: so many of its readers and viewers seem awfully quick to point out the resemblances between themselves and the hapless insect enthusiast who travels to a remote seaside village only to find himself imprisoned in a shack at the bottom of a pit, doomed to perpetually remove the ever-falling-in sand at the behest of the widow who lives there. Comparisons to modern work, marriage, etc. hang low, but the particularities — the joint on a beetle's leg, the sadistic villagers' ragged edges, the omnipresent sand grains themselves — hinder generalization by being drawn so closely and so objectively.
Following two years on in the English as well as the Japanese, The Face of Another presents three notebooks — scribbling in notebooks being a very, very common pursuit among Abe narrators — of a scientist who, badly disfigured by a liquid oxygen explosion, labors over an advanced mask he believes will grant him reintroduction into society. The broader goal narrows to the specific one of using his newly unfamiliar appearance to seduce his own wife. The majority of the text comprises the scientist's thoughts, which he thinks hard and often, about his disconnect with humanity, the function of faces themselves, and what happens to identity when you alter the surface. He's not nuts, exactly; just kind of obsessive and pedantic, but you get the feeling that the intersection of his training, situation and inclinations may actually warrant it.
On Japanese shelves three years before Woman in the Dunes but held until 1970 elsewhere, Inter Ice Age 4 is as close to the mainstream as the English-translated Abe gets. Ostensibly a science fiction novel about the consequences of future-prediction machines — the wider the knowledge of a prediction, the more the actual future deviates from the prediction, and thus the greater the necessity for an additional prediction, and then another, and another — it feels much more Abe-like upon introducing an emotionless race of biologically engineered aquatic human children, gills and all. As something less than a fan of sci-fi, I consider this Abean take on its clichés somewhat "above" the genre. Considered only within the Abe oeuvre, it's hard to say whether it's underappreciated or just minor.
5. Less Sane WorksAt first, 1967-in-Japanese and 1969-in-English's The Ruined Map seems, like Inter Ice Age 4, to be a genre exercise. It's told by a loner private eye in search of a distraught, hard-drinking dame's missing husband, and though a host of noir icons surface, it soon becomes evident that the novel will swerve, and hard, out of the well-worn grooves of detective fiction. His clues, a coffee shop's matchbook and the title's incomprehensible map, prove fabulously unhelpful. Only by coming assuming the vanished man's identity does he get on what may or may be the right track, leading straight through his grimy urban Japan into the core of a menacing sex ring. But by that point, he's well into the process of forgetting who he is or is supposed to be, let alone who he's after. Here we have two variables that, through Abe's novels, tend to rise inexorably and together: bizarre eroticism and the dissolution of identity.
Though Abe is rarely topical, it makes sense that he'd seize the 1980s aftershock of Cold War panic and/or apocalyptic resignation to throw a TAP into the culture of fallout shelters, stockpiling and the post-nuclear winter Earth. The Ark Sakura's slovenly, illegitimately born central character, who goes by the equally undesirable nicknames "Pig" or "Mole" but prefers the latter, has converted an abandoned quarry into a well-supplied "ark" meant to ferry its inhabitants safely through mutually assured destruction. Lacking friends or family — he compares himself to the eupcaccia, a fictional self-contained bug that feeds on its own feces — he simply recruits a local merchant and a couple of his shills.
Predictably, a power struggle develops, sublimated for one hilariously extended period into a tacit competition between the men over who can most powerfully slap the female shill's rump. By the book's final sentence, it's clear — as clear as Abe's endings get — that Pig/Mole has released his grip on reality or else never had it in the first place, but this is less the story of psychological and plain old logical breakdown than that of a high-minded mandate's bloat into farce. The later scenes of the book get Pig/Mole's leg stuck in his futuristic toilet, seemingly inextricably, as his "crew" looks on and debates just flushing him down.
6. Insane worksI don't how what happened in the 1970s, but something made it the decade when Abe would write a trio of novels eccentric by even his own standards. The Box Man, published in Japanese in 1973 and English the next year, presents itself as the notebooks, natch, of a man who withdraws from proper society to live in a cardboard box, thus joining the ranks of the "box men." These aren't garden variety winos huddled inside refrigerator boxes for nighttime warmth but enterprising voluntary recluses who trick out their cardboard shells, which they remain inside at all times, with stabilization devices, equipment racks and viewing windows.
What begins as a detailed how-to on the construction of an ideal box's man home and a treatise on the unique challenges and advantages box manhood subtly transforms into a disorienting narrative kaleidoscope. There might not just be one box man narrating; maybe there are a bunch. And maybe one of them is you, the reader. Whoever's doing the writing, they have strongly held, difficult-to-understand ideas about what exactly constitutes the identity of a "real" box man and what constitutes the identity of a "fake" one, and how either identity is gained, lost, stolen or bought.
Like The Ruined Map, Secret Rendezvous, out in Japanese in 1977 and English in 1979, launches into a hunt for a missing spouse that, starting out futile and growing ever more so, quickly falls into irrelevance. Over the course of (what else but) several notebooks, the narrator documents his quest for his disappeared wife, snagged in the wee hours by a seemingly legitimate ambulance — except, in perfect health, she hadn't called for one. Abe is frequently compared to Kafka, and this book is Exhibit A: scouring the vast, awkwardly-constructed hospital where his wife was supposedly deposited, he's enervated by layers of meaningless regulation and thousands of hours of excessive surveillance material to sift through. Abe being Abe, the machinations of a clandestine sex-tape racket run out of the complex's hidden wings and there is a climactic, as it were, electronically-assisted orgasm contest for which I lack the word count to do justice.
Also written in the 1970s but unpublished until the 1990s, Kangaroo Notebook, Abe's final complete novel, is his most thoroughgoingly surreal. The son of a doctor and a trained physician himself — though he only graduated med school by promising not to practice — Abe never wrote a character who didn't regret his decision to see a health care worker of any kind, for any reason. This was never more the case than with this novel's everyman, who, understandably, seeks medical attention for a patch of radishes found sprouting from his shins. Catheterized and IV'd up at the hospital, the poor fellow wakes up strapped into an animate gurney that propels him through a series of increasingly frightful settings, none connected in any obvious way to the last. He wends his way through locales including but by no means limited to an unsettling sulfur spring, an anxiety-producing department store, and a cabbage patch inhabited only by his mother's ghost.
As a last work, it's a fitting distillation of the themes that have gone before: there's a little of The Ruined Map's urban anomie, a little of Woman in the Dunes' utter futility, a little of The Box Man's "narrative reliability issues" (as Lin put it) and a little of all the other books' deep suspicion of doctors and fixation on the loss of identity. Plus, he cranks the absurdity past eleven. Video game designer Hideo Kojima calls Kangaroo Notebook the prime inspiration for Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. Hmm.
7. What Genre Does Kobo Abe Fit Into, Anyway?
Abe's some kind of hybrid between magic realist, existentialist and surrealist. That's a lot of -ists to digest in one sentence, so perhaps it's better put that he drops his characters into nightmarish, often bureaucratic scenarios which often diverge from the general nature of reality are are populated by secondary players who accept and even embrace the non sequiturs and logically-premised illogical conclusions that surround them.
This sounds insufferable, but Abe practically always redeems it. He transcends the realm of incoherent nonsense with the very literal, systematic affect mentioned above. The TAP describes the otherwise inexplicable stuff found in Abe's stories in language that defines cool precision. No matter how crazy his situation, the TAP soldiers on, observing and inferring as if in laboratory conditions. More mainstream magic realism lays a similar claim: a character goes about his humdrum life in humdrum terms, but along comes a specter, faerie or supernatural phenomenon — invoked in terms just as realistic as those describing the lampposts and mailboxes lining the street. Abe takes the realism about as far as it can tolerably go, seemingly operating by the formula that every instance of the absurd, the surreal or the fantastical must be balanced by an equal amount of surrounding mundanity.
8. How This Goes on to Save Abe's Novels from the Mire of Straight-Ahead Metaphor and/or Allegory
As tricky and exotic as this might sound, it's a variation on the same basic skill employed by, say, Stephen King, whose "ensouled appliances run darkly amok," as David Foster Wallace once put it, "in a world of Fritos, flatulence and trailer-park angst." But King's fabrications, no matter how grotesque or preposterous, unfailingly adhere to well-defined, if simple, internal logic. Abe's creations apparently know no such discipline, but his narrators nevertheless treat them as if they do. What's surprising is how easy it is to go along with the gag. Reviewing The Ark Sakura, Edmund Whitecalled it "a wildly improbable fable when recalled" which nevertheless "proceeds with fiendishly detailed verisimilitude when experienced from within."
While not what you'd necessarily call believable, Abe's novels nevertheless deliver the kind of reality that bypasses your judgment on that level and simply forces you to process it as-is. Described as wholes, or even described in a piece like this, they sound ludicrous, like narrative stunts — maybe even like wastes of the discerning reader's time. Some enthusiasts like to read them metaphorically or allegorically, but I'd argue that's a far less interesting interpretation than simply taking them straight on.
To read the works of Kobo Abe as either accretions of metaphors or of random incidents shouldn't, in my humble opinion, be possible. The amount and type of description Abe always made sure to include would seem to head that off. It's no more sensible to see in these books an archetypal drunk with an absent husband, an archetypal scarred scientist or an archetypal fallout shelter-dweller than it is to draw from them statements about the tenuousness of the individual's connection to the whole, about the dangers of medical professionals or about life's ultimate fruitlessness. These are the sort of books that are about their own particularities — or, in Abe's specific case, about his own peculiarities.

Danger on Vampire Trail. This was the first Hardy Boys book I ever read. I believe I was in second grade when my next-door neighbor and I each decided to read one of the blue-spined mysteries that sat on his older brother’s shelf. The books were remnants of the older brother’s grade-school reading, I suppose, which he had never bothered to remove from his walls and pile into boxes in the basement (or sell for a dime apiece at a garage sale, or foist off on Goodwill, or trade in for Tom Clancy novels at the used book store), being altogether too engrossed in programming his Atari 800 computer, and other important high school things that would certainly never involve the brothers Hardy. He had apparently never become terribly interested in Frank and Joe, even in his pre-Atari days; he had only five or six Hardy Boys books and—embarrassingly—a few assorted Bobbsey Twins adventures. I could never understand why he had these facile, yellow-spined things with unarresting titles like “Mystery at the Seaside” or “The Missing Pony.” In fact, I could not fathom who would be at all interested in the series, which seemed to be merely the Hardy Boys, Jr., a concept which had no place in the cosmos occupied by both the Hardy brothers and Nancy Drew. The Hardys were for boys, Nancy for girls; for whom were the Bobbseys meant? Preschoolers? Maybe. But unsurprisingly, the name of the “author” of this doomed series escapes my memory, while the names Franklin W. Dixon and Carolyn Keene come promptly to mind.
These authors’ names relate to an important benchmark in any Hardy or Drew fan’s reading life. It took me four years or so before I finally admitted to myself that neither Mr. Dixon nor Ms. Keene were real people, that in fact the eighty or so adventures of Bayport’s finest (eighty death-defying adventures crammed impossibly into Frank and Joe’s high school years) were not all written by the same person. The single-author theory seemed entirely plausible at first, when my experience with the Boys encompassed only a few books which, though somewhat dated, still contained copyright dates in the 1960s. Mr. Dixon, then, was an aging but still prolific man, who perhaps got up early every morning at his home on the east coast (yes, that seemed right—he should be able to look out at the ocean while orchestrating Frank and Joe’s escape from an elaborate death trap in Egypt, a locked magician’s box in Scotland, a tiger in India) to write five chapters or so. My faith began to crumble, however, as I checked out older editions of the books from my grade school resource room, editions with yellowing paper, which lacked the familiar blue spines and were bound instead in beige covers with brown lettering and, on the front cover, an iconic silhouette of two Hardy Boy-ish figures crouching with flashlights, a sad substitute for the exciting, customized illustrations that graced the newer editions. These editions contained even more outdated language than the blue-spines, using passé terms for African Americans that seemed to place the stories in the 1930s. Indeed, a glance at the copyright page confirmed this estimation.
The single-F. W. Dixon theory was seeming less likely. Even if he had begun writing the mysteries at the age of 20, the secretive (there was never an "about the author" at the end of the books) Dixon would still be in his seventies, much too old to be writing at the rate at which the Hardy novels were churned out. Finally, I came to the uneasy conclusion that there may have once been a real Dixon in the ’20s or ’30s, but he had since passed away, and his series had been edited, updated, and continued by a panel of ghostwriters at Simon & Schuster (I threw out theories which included a single ghostwriter or a Franklin Jr. carrying on his father’s tradition) who used the pseudonym for any number of reasons: to preserve the continuity of the series for youngsters who would be wary of a Hardy Boys tale told by Brian Reynolds or Suresh Desai, or to ensure that all Hardy Boys books would be shelved together in both library and bookstore, rather than scattered about by zealous alphabetizers.
With this decision (this all took place long before the current era in which one can merely Google Dixon’s name and learn that he was never anything but a pseudonym) I passed into a more mature appreciation of the series. I recognized that I was in some way being deceived, but I accepted the deception, as the theater-goer accepts the deception that what he or she sees on stage is real; I knew that there was no wizened Hardy patriarch writing the books somewhere on a misty coast; I knew they were most likely written by some guy in a suit and tie in a cubicle in a glass office tower, or maybe by a team of such people, brainstorming about where the next book should be set, about what should be stolen or who should be kidnapped. I knew this, but it didn’t really matter, and I didn’t think about it too often, aside from the occasional reverie about what it would be like to write Hardy Boys novels myself (and never getting credit for it). It might not be that bad as a career. Though creativity would be somewhat stifled by the formulas that must be employed in writing the books, it would still be rewarding to see my own episodes sitting in a line with all of the others (I could look at a shelf in the bookstore and say, “I wrote numbers 27, 45, and 78”) and think that maybe at least one of them was the personal favorite of some avid young Hardy reader.
I must say, however, that Danger on Vampire Trail would not be included in my list of personal favorites. I remember nearly nothing of the book, except that it involved vampire bats (though these were not central to the plot; in fact, I think I remember feeling vaguely exploited by Mr. Dixon, who obviously chose an exotic title to invite readership of a book which was in actuality not at all fantastic) and a camping area full of recreational vehicles. This seemed to be the trend among the first set of Hardy Boys novels: exciting titles, intriguing cover art, the promise of an exotic location and the threat of death (clearly an idle threat: I do not recall anyone dying in those blue-spined Hardy adventures, not even villains; though the Hardys may be locked in a trunk in the basement of a burning building, their survival is never in doubt, no matter how many chapters end with “We’re trapped!”)—all designed to lure readers to rather boring, outdated stories probably written several decades earlier (though with this disclaimer on the copyright page: “In this new story, based on the original of the same title, Mr. Dixon has incorporated the most up-to-date methods used by police and private detectives.” But what did that mean? Perhaps a few glaring anachronisms eliminated, or an added chapter in which Frank and Joe dust for fingerprints or reconstruct a suspect’s face using their very own police sketch kit).
To be fair, the trend does not really start until around the tenth installment of the first set of Hardy books. Witness some titles from those first ten: The Tower Treasure, The House on the Cliff, The Shore Road Mystery, The Secret of the Caves. Nothing to falsely arouse a youngster here. These early titles matter-of-factly relate what the story is about; they are not advertisements.
This matter-of-factness disappears with the tenth Hardy mystery. It assails the potential purchaser with the irresistible question of What Happened at Midnight. Like a science fiction novel that propels the reader through 600 closely-printed pages by the promise of a spectacular revelation at the end, #10 impels the reader to purchase or borrow the book to find out what indeed happened at the witching hour. And thus began the titillating tease of the blue-spines. I myself was taken in by #11, While the Clock Ticked, and by its terrifying cover, which depicted the teenaged detectives bound and gagged in a dimly-lit room, straining frantically, sweaty-faced, looking wide-eyed at an insane, white-haired man—presumably their captor—emerging from a secret room behind a grandfather clock. The book was not carried in my local B. Dalton; I ordered it, and my anticipation was almost unbearable the day the store called to tell me it had arrived. Though I finished the book in two days, the normal period required to polish off those unfailingly 170-page-long volumes, it left me disappointed. The details of the story escape me, but the routine was all too familiar: the brothers track down a criminal in Bayport, are placed by the criminal in an unnecessarily elaborate death-trap, but they manage to escape in Chapter XX, just in time for an amusing epilogue and a look ahead to their next case, conveniently plugged like so: “The boys laughed, and gazed up at the huge clock. Silently, they wondered when another case might come their way. Sooner than they expected, they were to find out, when Frank and Joe spotted strange footprints under the window.”
Though I must have read 30 or 40 of the original blue-spined books, not one retains a bright spot in my memory. F. W. Dixon tried his best to innovate and add new elements to the tales. He sent his protagonists to exotic ports-of-call—war-torn Central America in The Mark on the Door, Scotland in The Secret Agent on Flight 101, India in The Bombay Boomerang, Africa in The Mysterious Caravan, and the depths of the Yucatan in The Jungle Pyramid. But no matter where the Hardy siblings traveled, I found their adventures invariably lackluster. Though they may have engaged a pre-teenage boy in the late 1960s or early ’70s, they were hopelessly insufficient to leave me any permanent pleasant memories. I would never stay up until one in the morning reading The Mysterious Caravan.
Happily, however, the executives at Simon & Schuster must have realized the dwindling audience for F. W. Dixon’s original series, and with #59 the Hardy Boys entered a new era. The last of the fifties—Night of the Werewolf—launched the brothers onto a more exciting trajectory. The post-58 bunch, written in the late 1970s and early ’80s, satisfied my desire for a more contemporary thrill, and I soon devoured the entire set. The covers presented Frank and Joe in modern coiffure and wardrobe, though they continued to change their features after each adventure (perhaps to avoid recognition by paroled crooks from past episodes): in #63 the boys appear as trim, intellectual sweater-wearers, while in #64 they wear tight short-sleeved shirts, are shaggy-headed with a hint of hair on their slightly exposed chests; still stranger, in #77 they seem to be neat yuppies out on a company picnic (though an out-of-place tiger growls menacingly from a rock behind them). Perhaps Simon & Schuster hoped to appeal to a wide range of white males and changed the Hardys’ appearances to approximate those of their readers. (I myself had a more definite resemblance: the first name of the elder Hardy sibling.)
Despite the variability of the boys’ appearance, their adventures became consistently entertaining. I still fondly recall such gems as Mystery of Smugglers Cove (#64), which took the Hardys into the backwaters of the Everglades after being wrongly accused of stealing a valuable painting. In the seventy-third Hardy adventure, strange happenings at a local Bayport theater combine with a plot to hold the president of the United States for a Billion Dollar Ransom. Who could forget the snowy intrigue and danger of #78, plainly entitled Cave-In, with a cover depicting the brothers hanging perilously from a cable over a snowy Lake Tahoe slope, a Sno-Cat creeping menacingly towards them? The Four-Headed Dragon actually did keep me up until one in the morning, with its gripping tale of a mysterious mansion in the woods surrounding Bayport, of criminals bent on using a newly-developed laser gun to sever the Alaskan pipeline.
Unlike their predecessors, these new adventures always lived up to the thrills promised by their titles. The Demon’s Den delivered a devilish plot hidden in the placid Canadian timberlands—a diabolical scientist (see the terrifying illustration on page 190) bent on creating a race of supermen to compete in the Olympics for an unnamed eastern European country. These ubermensch, named “Alpha,” “Beta,” and “Omega,” allude to history and literature both: the eugenic schemes of Hitler and the fancies of Aldous Huxley in Brave New World. Clearly the ghostwriters at Simon & Schuster were getting more ambitious. Even titles like The Roaring River Mystery concealed, behind their bland covers, compelling tales of bank robberies and foul play on the white-water rapids of Maine.
But the zenith of the Hardy middle period (for we have not yet come to the final incarnation of the adventures, the sexy “Hardy Boys Casefiles”) came in my favorite of the books: Revenge of the Desert Phantom. Though abnormally brief—only 157 pages and 15 chapters—this book packed in all of the elements which later made the Casefiles so appealing: foreign countries (France, along with a fictional African nation called Zebwa), beautiful foreign heroines (Niki—the daughter of the assassinated leader of Zebwa), villains who had committed murder and were prepared to do it again (previous bad guys, though always vowing, “I’ll get you, Hardys,” never seemed quite serious about it), technology (the book puts the Hardys at the helm of an armored car, called the Rhino, which can also float), and Agatha Christie-like plot twists and surprises (the real assassin turns out to be Akutu, the leader of the loyalist forces). However, at the end of this book we can see the ridiculous direction in which the series is headed; from Chief Collig of the Bayport police the boys receive a van which they will soon equip with surveillance equipment and other gadgetry inappropriate even for the far-fetched Hardy series. The Hardys could never be the Scooby-Doo gang with its Mystery Machine, nor have a Hardymobile in which to pursue criminals. These developments surely offended other Hardy purists as much as they offended me; as the old series wandered off into outer space (literally; in #85, The Skyfire Puzzle, Frank and Joe man a space shuttle flight), a new beginning was clearly needed; the slate needed to be wiped clean.
Before revealing (to those unfamiliar with the first of the Hardy Boys Casefiles: Dead on Target) exactly whose slate was wiped clean, a brief note about the supporting cast of the Hardy adventures. First, the Hardy family: famous father Fenton, the brilliant but frequently absent detective-dad; slender and attractive Laura Hardy (whom one can imagine as an older but no less perky and vivacious Laura Petry from The Dick Van Dyke Show), hardy, hearty Hardy mom, undaunted by the many nights of sleeping alone while Fenton solves crimes in New York City; and lovable Aunt Gertrude, “a stern, angular woman,” Fenton’s spinster sister who often stays at the Hardy home. No matter what dangers the Hardys may encounter, they always have this warm trio to support and love them.
But the Hardys are no homebodies; they have plenty of chums. Perhaps their best friend is stout Chet Morton, a “roly-poly youth who preferred eating to danger,” but who often joins in their adventures and provides comic relief by dropping a bowl of batter on his head, sitting on a pin, or merely driving by in his memorable yellow jalopy. Frank and Joe are friends with the jocks as well (and find time between their many cases to play for Bayport High’s baseball team): lanky, rangy Biff Hooper, tackle on the Bayport High football team, whose heavy fists can always be counted on to assist the Hardys should their adversaries get physical. The Hardys’ diverse group of friends has room for “olive-skinned” Tony Prito, whose father owns a construction company and who himself owns a motorboat called the Napoli, and even for Phil Cohen, a quiet Jew, “dark-haired and slender,” who “enjoyed reading as much as sports.”
Finally, no discussion of the Hardys’ social lives can omit their steadies (though it must be difficult to have a maturing relationship when one’s age remains fixed at seventeen or eighteen, as do Joe and Frank’s, respectively). Fortunately, their girlfriends remain similarly stuck in time. Frank’s favorite date is the blonde, brown-eyed Callie Shaw, and Joe finds himself hopelessly devoted to the “vivacious, dark-haired” Iola Morton, slimmer sister of Chet. These girls appear in the early stages of an occasional Hardy adventure, just long enough to participate in a beach party or barbecue, perhaps make an insightful comment or two (blushing as they do so), but infrequently enough to imply anything more than chaste, healthy relationships with the opposite sex.
Nevertheless, powerful emotions are shared between the Hardys and their wholesomely attractive gals. The degree of that power is demonstrated, tragically, in the inaugural volume of the new, sleeker Hardy series. “Get out of my way, Frank!” Joe screams at his brother in the first line of Dead on Target as he hopelessly lunges towards the flaming wreckage of the Hardys’ yellow sedan, the explosion of which the brothers have just witnessed in the parking garage of their local mall. His suicidal struggle towards the burning car is a desperate attempt to save the life of Iola, with whom he had recently quarreled, and who had, with horrendous misfortune, retired to the sedan a few minutes before the explosion. As Callie notes later in the book: “I guess he really did love Iola, in spite of his wandering eye.” In any case, what a beginning for the new series! The violent death of a main character—in the first chapter no less—signaled a dramatic change of direction for Simon & Schuster’s teenage gumshoes. I remember the day after I purchased Dead on Target and Evil, Inc. (the second in the new series). It was April Fool’s Day, so when I told one of my fellow fifth-grade fans that the Hardys had been reincarnated, he refused to believe me and was put out that I would so cruelly toy with his emotions. He soon acknowledged the veracity of my claim, however, and came to love, as I did, the stylishly designed, compact Casefiles, with their titillating titles—Deathgame and Edge of Destruction were later examples—and stories that always made good on the titles’ promises. Under each title was an added bonus: an epigraph which wittily hinted at the thrills to come. “Revenge is always a personal matter,” noted the cover of Dead on Target. Other standouts: “A murder contract is always binding”; “Terror has many faces—all deadly”; “In the cult of the Rajah, death is a way of life.”
The Hardys had modernized, inside and out. Whereas a beach party was the hippest thing the Hardys and their friends could think to do in the past, they now listened to Led Zeppelin, hung out at diners until well past midnight, and traveled to locales more exotic and exciting than ever before. In trying to avenge Iola’s death, the brothers become involved with a secret government agency called the Network and end up battling international terrorism, represented by an Arab assassin named Al-Rousasa. In Evil, Inc. the brothers go undercover to bust an organized crime ring in France. After reading this pair of adventures, I feverishly anticipated the next installment—Cult of Crime—a excerpt from which had been included at the end of Casefile No. 2.
Cult of Crime. The very title spooked me, calling to mind images of Jonestown, of Satanists who kidnapped children and engaged in midnight acts of bestiality in storm drains. Even the cover of the book exceeded my expectations. Frank and Joe flee from a pack of torch-bearing cultists, one of whom fires a gun in their direction. I was so taken with the image that I even considered getting my hair cut like Joe’s.
The new Franklin W. Dixons (I imagine top management at Simon & Schuster laying off the old stale Dixon crew and bringing in a fresh batch of Franklins, recent graduates of Ivy League schools who were ready to pour their intelligence and energy into making the Casefiles the Hardy books they themselves never had as adolescents. However, S&S must have given the stale Franklin W.’s some severance work, because the middle series perpetuated into further idiocy; clearly all of the publisher’s real energy was thrown into the Casefiles.) were not taking their job that seriously, however. The relative realism of the third installment contrasts sharply with the science fiction of The Lazarus Plot (No. 4), in which the Hardys get their first hope that, impossibly, Iola Morton may still be alive. As it turns out, the Iola the brothers see is only a clone created by a laboratory staffed by “the most diabolical team of scientists ever assembled.” The book was good, though, and the college grads went on to turn out a series of classics, from Edge of Destruction, in which the Hardys traipse through the sewers of New York City to thwart an organized crime boss who threatens to unleash a deadly virus upon the Big Apple, to Hostages of Hate, in which a group of terrorists takes hostages, Callie Shaw among them, on an airplane in Washington, DC. Callie performs admirably under this immense strain and, while on television delivering the terrorists’ demands, sends Frank a secret message using the personal sign language the two have developed to talk to each other during class. Thus Frank, by watching Callie’s blinking patterns, receives messages like “Only two on plane,” and “Bomb real.” Apparently Callie is not the airhead she appeared to be at all those beach parties.
Sadly, the creativity of the new series did not last. After the unexpected dullness of The Borgia Dagger and its successor, No. 14, Too Many Traitors, I lost interest in the series. It is hard to say whether I simply outgrew it or the Ivy League Dixons had burned out. My parting with Frank and Joe was neither bitter nor regretful; we had been tight pals for several years; indeed, I was at least as faithful as Biff, Tony, Phil, or Chet—but we had now grown apart, and I was beginning to move in different circles, spending late nights with the Stephen King-Dean Koontz crowd. The Hardys, as always, moved to the beat of their own drum, however repetitive a pounding it may have been. Inertia kept the long line of Hardy adventures on the top level of my bookshelf until I finally packed them all in a box and packed the box down in the basement, exhumed only when I decided to eulogize the brothers here.
In truth, though, the Hardys need no eulogy; in a used book store I came across Casefile No. 101. I forget the title (it looked unsurprisingly banal), but even the cover was a bore: instead of a drawing which re-imagined Frank and Joe’s appearance and fashion sense, this one featured only a photograph of two 90210-looking males, supposedly the legendary boy-gumshoes, and an enthusiastic note encouraging us all to catch the new Hardy Boys television show. The Hardys and I have clearly parted ways, and while I’m tempted to re-read a few of the old Casefiles for nostalgic value, such a reunion would not be quite valuable enough to spend the time on, so our paths continue to diverge.
My path and that of my neighbor, I believe, first began to diverge as I read Danger on Vampire Trail. While I devoured Danger in a day or two, my reading partner and friend plodded along with his installment, and I don’t think Dave ever finished The Secret of the Lost Tunnel. As I moved ahead, purchasing some of the books, borrowing others from the library, above all reading them, Dave confided to me that he simply didn’t like reading. While I ordered Night of the Werewolf from the Scholastic book order form we were offered at school, Dave stuck to Choose Your Own Adventure books, Hot Dog and Dynamite magazines, and posters of action figures and cute pets. When I moved on to King, Koontz, and Co., Dave concentrated on computer games, reading only what was required for school. Whereas for Dave the Hardys were a passing, boring diversion, for me they became a habit. The Hardys were like training wheels, easy and enjoyable exercises that helped me develop the balance necessary for a lifetime of reading books. Though I probably would have been better off practicing on more classic childhood favorites—Robert Louis Stevenson, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Chronicles of Narnia, and so on—I turn to the third-to-last paragraph of Too Many Traitors, the last Hardy book I ever read, for reassurance:
“It’s okay,” Joe replied. “We met girls, we went swimming, we went boating, we saw a lot of scenery and sights. I’ve had enough vacationing for a lifetime.”

My life boxed and crated. Transient. Completely uprooting my existence and collapsing it into the family Honda. University in one town. Internships in another. Back and forth, ping-ponging along Ontario's highways every four months for about five years. Years ago, this was my life.I learned to adjust to my new surroundings very quickly. Whatever record albums I happened to own at the time would be the first things unpacked, sorted and shelved along with whatever stereo I could afford. Next would be books and the milk crates that passed for furniture.Once these were set up I would generally think of my apartment as being complete. Four walls became a home. Anything else is basically an afterthought, an extravagance that I might or might not indulge in, like, I suppose, a chair.Every four months the following could be witnessed on Highway 401: a suitcase full of clothes with me in the backseat, a trunk full of crated books and records, my father at the wheel of the Honda still shaking his head from the contents of the trunk, completely mystified as to how the quantity of books and records had somehow increased exponentially since four months previous, and my mother riding shotgun, snacks at the ready. And, oh yeah, a giant bed tethered precariously to the roof of the car, overhanging front and back, providing shade under the Southern Ontario sun.More than anything else could, my books and records anchored me to my new surroundings - re-connecting me with me. They defined my home. They still do. The milk crates disappeared when I discovered Ikea and I've made the necessary overtures to furniture dealers. But the core of my world is as it always has been.There's a passage in A History of Reading that leads me to believe that Alberto Manguel would understand, that we're cut from the same cloth. The son of a diplomat, Manguel moved around a great deal as a boy. "Books gave me a permanent home," he writes, "and one I could inhabit exactly as I felt like, at any time, no matter how strange the room."It is sentiments like that, moments of memoir, that give what could have been a dry cultural history run-through its spirit. In the end, A History of Reading is anything but dry, as Manguel, a wonderful storyteller, chronicles "reading" from ancient civilizations on up to the modern age.As a young man in Argentina, Manguel was honored to be a reader to the great Jorge Luis Borges, by then blind. Manguel looks back on these reading sessions as "happy captivity", reading aloud whatever Borges asked him to from his own library. In this way did Borges re-connect and rediscover a part of himself. Reading a book (or having it read to you) has a cumulative effect. Manguel writes that "every book has been engendered by long successions of other books." Borges was intimately familiar with each of the books that Manguel would read to him. Yet with each new reading, Borges' brain would have a new take on it. His mind would not only connect it with other books he's read, but with previous readings of the same book. Each would leave its imprint.And different people, imprinted by different attitudes can perceive the same text in different, often contradictory ways. And no single reading can be isolated as the one correct reading. Manguel writes of Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis which has, by different readers, been called: humor, parable, a Bolshevik tract, a Bourgeois tract, an allegory. Some readings might be better informed, more lucid, more challenging. But "no reading can ever be final," Manguel writes. "This is not a failure of the process, but proof of our freedom as readers."Manguel, in addition to assessing theories of reading, also teaches us a bit of history. He charts the development of paper and its antecedents - tablets, codex, scrolls. He writes about how the type of surface determined both the type of storage and one's own reading space. (In my case, reclining on a futon in my den, away from the distractions of the TVs and stereos that are the centerpieces of both bedroom and living room. If no remote control is within arm's reach, my reading stands a chance.)One of my favorite chapters in the book deals with public readings in mid-1800s Cuba. A largely illiterate workforce was nevertheless one thirsty for stories. So, while people worked, while their bodies performed routine functions, their minds would be engaged by stories - they would be read to. Eventually, fearing intellectual subversion, a prohibition went into effect resulting, as prohibitions will, in "underground" clandestine work-time readings. These kinds of readings continued among the Cuban immigrant population of the US into the early 20th century.Manguel also tells us about how the increase in world travel cried out for a new kind of portable book. And a 'good book', beyond just the already-available populist or pulp fiction. The result - the founding of the iconic Penguin.The history of libraries, the history of cataloguing, censorship through the ages, and a great little aside about a noted life-long book-thief - they're all given due consideration in Manguel's book. He even explores the history of reading-glasses (perched on the nose of the "bespectacled book fool")Well, this bespectacled book-fool is a hoarder. That trunk full of books and records would now barely cover the A's. Manguel, my kindred spirit, he knows what it's like. He reckons that his books were brought into his home for a reason. Sure, he could attribute it to thoroughness, or scarcity, or scholarship. But Manguel knows the truth. He knows its just "voluptuous greed". "I enjoy the sight of my crowded bookshelves," he writes. "I delight in knowing that I'm surrounded by a sort of inventory of my life."